Arts & Culture King Solomon’s Angst is Material for British Jew’s One-man Shows

“The prophet Elijah would not sit down for coffee at Starbucks,” Marcus Freed says confidently. “He would obliterate it.”

Solomon “slept with a lot of people and got in trouble for it, Job would be on Prozac if he lived today,” Freed adds, and the judge Deborah “would not be the kind of person you would want on a date.”

He muses for a moment.

“Or maybe you would.”

The British actor and one-time yeshiva student has given a lot of thought to biblical figures, especially Elijah and Solomon — he’s created one-man shows about each.

And after 18 months of working on those two characters, he’s thinking about a much broader project.

“I would love to create a complete biblical series, like Shakespeare’s history plays. The Bible is a massive resource to Jewish writers,” he says. “Shakespeare had Latin and Italian chronicles. This is what we have.”

He stumbled onto the project almost by accident, when he was asked to create a performance for a Jewish education workshop in December 1999.

His only instruction was that the piece be about time.

He knew the famous “a time to be born, a time to die” passage from Ecclesiastes, and decided to write a piece that would end with Solomon writing those words.

“I like Solomon’s teen-age angst — when he’s 60,” Freed says.

The performance got a standing ovation.

“And, accidentally, the career goes in a different direction,” Freed says with a smile and a shrug.

Since then, the performances have quite literally taken him in many directions, from Israel to South Africa, Mexico to Hungary. He’s performed in venues from stone amphitheaters in South America to a five-star kosher hotel overlooking the Mediterranean in the south of France.